Shame on you Cardinal Brady

I was born and raised in a period of moral certainty. The arbiter of this certainty was the Church and by the Church I mean the bishops, the priests and the religious orders who ran the schools. Sex was a huge part of the deliberations of what was moral and what was not. Read the literature of the period and you will get an idea of what I mean. However apart from the strictures that were handed down, people themselves had a good innate sense of what was right and what was wrong.

I am reminded of all of this this morning listening to Cardinal Brady and a vox pop of mass goers outside Rathmines Church. The past may be a different country and they may have done things differently there. We may look back now and think that some of those moral certainties were crazy but the past is not so different a country in some respects and some of those moral certainties did not need to be handed down from those on high arbiters. They have been around since we began to seek shelter in caves. One of them is that we do not do harm to children and those who do will be called to account. Cardinal Brady and his supporters amongst the Rathmines mass goers don’t somehow seem to get that one.

And the past was not as different as you might think. I was in the early ‘70’s a young and naïve social working in a south city suburb. A case of sexual exploitation of children came to my attention. I brought it to the attention of my immediate superior, a nun, who immediately brought it to the attention of the Gardaí and the health authorities and the issue was dealt with. Cardinal Brady is saying, as I write this, that sexual abuse of children is ‘complex and difficult’ ‘thirty five years ago we were in a different world and had different standards’. Well we were not and we did not and it is not a complex or difficult problem. Child abuse is a criminal offence. It is now and it was then and everyone with a smidgín of common sense knew and knows that. The standards thirty five years ago were the same. It is just our knowledge now is better.

Shame on you Cardinal Brady. You put the Church and its structures and above all its power base before the physical and moral welfare of innocent children and you are using the most discredited of 20th century defences ‘I was only obeying orders’ and we know who came up with that defence.